Mueller: Ex-Trump campaign chair lied, broke plea agreement

27 November, 2018

In a court filing on Monday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller declared that President Donald Trump's former Campaign Chair Paul Manafort has violated his plea deal with federal prosecutors by lying multiple times to the FBI.

The brief but remarkable development indicates that not only has the former Trump campaign chairman shared extensive information with Justice Department prosecutors since he began cooperating, but that prosecutors also believe they are able to verify or refute that information.

Mueller revealed the charge in a court filing Monday that indicated Manafort has violated the plea deal he made in the investigation by lying numerous times to the FBI.

Manafort disputes that characterisation; his attorneys write in the joint filing that he "has provided information to the government in an effort to live up to his cooperation obligations".

The conventional wisdom among legal experts seems to be that Manafort did not care about telling the truth because he's going all in on President Donald Trump pardoning him.

The move signals a return to the acrimonious relationship Manafort has had with the special counsel's office since his indictment previous year.

"Given the conflict in the parties" positions, there is no reason to delay the sentencing herein, and he asks the Court to set a sentencing date in this matter, ' they said.

"After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel's Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement", prosecutors wrote.

Manafort said in the same filing he disagreed with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's assertion that he lied to investigators.

The timing of the Manafort status update is worth noting in its own right - seriously, it feels like it was only just yesterday that President Trump supplied written answers to Mueller's questions "regarding the Russia-related topics of the inquiry".

Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein said that while the news was about Manafort, that all roads lead to Trump.

The agreement pertains to one of two cases against Manafort.

For more than a year now, Manafort has been at the heart of several unresolved threads of the Mueller investigation.

Russian Federation denies United States allegations it hacked Democratic Party emails and ran a disinformation campaign, largely on social media.

It did not give details of what Manafort allegedly lied about. Kilimnik, though also charged by Mueller, has not surfaced in the USA court system.

He is scheduled to be sentenced in that case in February.

Under an agreement with prosecutors, Manafort faces a maximum prison sentence of about 10 years, not counting a sentence for his August conviction in Virginia for bank and tax fraud.

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